American politics

Republican reform

Fringe and purge

A COUPLE of days ago Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry published a long essay in the National Review arguing that Republicans need to stop engaging in intra-party purity wars, and fighting politics as if it were a perpetual last stand against the teeming hordes of darkest Mordor, if they expect to get anything accomplished. Kevin Drum thinks the essay is "timid", however, because it doesn't include any concrete recommendations for changes in the GOP's programme. I think that's misguided. Ultimately the GOP will need to endorse some new policies, but it's also important to attack the politics of impending doom and factional purges as such. Messrs Ponnuru and Lowry are right to identify the problem as "an apocalyptic conservative politics":

It is a politics of perpetual intra-Republican denunciation. It focuses its fire on other conservatives as much as on liberals. It takes more satisfaction in a complete loss on supposed principle than in a partial victory, let alone in the mere avoidance of worse outcomes. It has only one tactic—raise the stakes, hope to lower the boom—and treats any prudential disagreement with that tactic as a betrayal.

For the authors, the problem with this kind of politics is that it doesn't work; there aren't enough conservatives in Congress, or in America, for the Alamo approach to win. But beyond the question of efficacy, or even of the particular issues on which it gains a toehold, this kind of ideological-purity feedback loop is a scary phenomenon in and of itself. And it extends well beyond the GOP's doomed shutdown brinkmanship this autumn, or even the battle over Obamacare. Ideological purity tests and apocalyptic pessimism have become entrenched features of Republican politics.

Last week, for example, "This American Life" reported on Josh Inglett, a 20-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville whom Scott Walker, the state's Republican governor, nominated to serve on the state university system's board of regents. Mr Walker rescinded the nomination after right-wing websites reported that Mr Inglett, himself a Republican, had been one of the 1m Wisconsin voters who signed a Democratic-led petition to recall the governor in 2011, which led to an election that Mr Walker ultimately won. (State law forbids the use of partisan tests in appointments to the university system's board of regents.) A Democratic senator who asked Mr Walker not to rescind Mr Inglett's nomination called it "absolute McCarthyism", which, in this case, really doesn't seem like a stretch. Signing the petition also cost the job of a Republican judge with an impeccable set of endorsements from local police and attorneys; a challenger used his petition signature as a wedge to take him out in the next election.

And so on. This is all familiar enough by now, but the point is that Republicans who attack the tone and tactics of tea-party politics, without explicitly disagreeing on policy grounds, are not dissenting in a merely cosmetic fashion. Indeed, many of the so-called policy planks in contemporary hard-right politics are more the product of a need to attack sitting GOP officeholders for supposed moderate treachery than they are the result of any serious or consistent conservative ideology. This is why, for example, when conservative policy wonks at the American Enterprise Institute sit down to come up with an alternative universal health-insurance plan, what they come up with shares enough features with Obamacare that GOP politicians have to reject it out of hand.

The subordination of policy to tactics is a feature of apocalyptic-extremist factional politics. It's a mistake to think that extremist parties are characterised by ideological rigidity; in fact, on any question on which there can be internal competition in such parties, there tends to be a succession of changes in position. Each shift produces apostates who can be purged on the basis of previously holding positions that have now been revealed as incorrect, and this provides opportunities for advancement to lower-ranking members. A party caught up in this dynamic can't take any policy positions on which it might be able to compromise with the opposition, or win new constituencies outside of existing insiders; the compromise would be a death sentence for the members who agree to it, and allegiance to new constituents is suspect in the eyes of existing ones. The GOP has to wrench itself out of this internal political spiral in order to make concrete moves on policy or even on the kind of image it wants to project to non-conservatives, and it makes sense for worried Republicans to take up this problem as an issue in its own right.

"I've yet to hear a compelling argument as to why Barack Obama should be considered to be significantly to the left of center, even in the very much right-biased spectrum of American politics."

It's not that you haven't heard anything, it's that nothing said will convince you beyond what you're convinced of.

Flip it- convince me his faith in capitalism and the free markets? Convince me of his faith in the individual?

And the moment you start speaking "He believes in the markets in the context of what the government wants", or "he believes in the individual in the context of the needs of the greater society", or other such gibberish, then there's your answer.

"I've never understood how the dysfunctions of U.S. cities are supposed to be linked to national politics, beyond the logic of Party A bad Party B good."

So your understanding between the two parties is that their underlying principles on governance is the same except on the national level? You mean, after all of Obama's crowing about how the Republican party leaves people to the mercy of the markets, you only thought this was a national political distinction and everything else was the same below that?

I'm sorry, you leave me speechless. I don't know what else to say? I just assumed people thought/knew there was a fundamental and principled difference in the way the two parties approached governance. Despite your readings, you missed that distinction. I'm sorry- I was wrong.

Or that the cities are cherry-picked to fit their Democrats=bad narrative. Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle, among others, are also cities/regions long run by Democrats in something approaching a one-party system. And those cities just so happen to comprise some of the wealthiest and most succesful places in the country, but never mind that - let's focus on Detroit!

I think the Reagan strategy you describe is a good baseline for all politicians: ask for everything, take what you can get. We'll see what happens over the next few months, but Cruz (and the TP in general) don't seem to be either laying out a plan for what they actually want or interested in compromise. Politicians of all stripes are great at the "maximal position" part, but we're seeing a major failure of the "cut a deal" part.

I am hopeful you're right. I suppose there were two ways to go for a principled small-but-not-zero-government conservative during the Bush era, either stay in the party and feel like a fool or drop them like a hot rock. I expect some of the fire-breathing now if from those who stayed in and were fools.